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Yellow Pages trimming home delivery of once indispensable directory

Yellow Pages trimming home delivery of once indispensable directory

When was the last time you cracked open the Yellow Pages when you were shopping for a product or service?

That question occurred to me when the new Yellow Pages appeared on my stoop last month. I couldn’t remember picking up its predecessor, which sat unused and pristine on a shelf next to the phone for the last year. I suspect I’m not alone.

Yellow Pages Ltd. confirmed that suspicion Monday with an announcement that it would begin cutting back on door-to-door deliveries of the once massive business directory in areas where research shows it and other print media were in declining usage. When we let our fingers do the walking, for most of us it’s on a keyboard.

It’s yet another once commonplace part of our lives that’s perhaps not obsolete but certainly being forced to adapt to the way new technology has reshaped society and the way we do things.

Neighbourhoods in the Ontario cities of Brampton, Mississauga and Oakville will be the first to not receive the books on doorsteps, says Fiona Story, the company’s director of public relations and corporate communications.

“This could be one building in particular, it could be a couple of streets, it could be a neighbourhood, depending on the size of the community,” she told Yahoo Canada News.

Instead, they’ll be available in racks at local businesses, from newspaper-style boxes or delivered to homes that specifically request one.

Yellow Pages, like a lot of communications media, has moved much of its operation to cyberspace. Story said more than half its annual revenue, or about $450, now comes from its digital platforms, including mobile apps.

“Print still has a user base and it still has a base of small businesses that rely on it to advertise their goods and services,” she said.

The list of things we once relied on, once took for granted, that have disappeared or changed radically keeps growing. And the speed at which they’re being supplanted seems to be increasing.

I grew up when phones still had rotary dials, when you needed operators to place a long-distance call (remember operators, anyone?), and if it was overseas, the operators made you hang up while they set up the call.

Number of telephone landlines declining

Now, according to Statistics Canada, one in five Canadian households relied on cellphones exclusively in 2013. The figure for households whose members were 35 and under was 60 per cent.

Speaking of phones, when was the last time you used a public pay telephone? The ubiquity of cellphones has meant they’re not a paying proposition for phone companies, which are removing them steadily while charging 50 cents a call. Regulators in 2013 rejected the telecom sector’s demand to double the rate for the estimated 70,000 pay phones remaining in Canada.

There’s a debate over whether the wristwatch is on its way out. People who keep a death-grip on their phones can easily get the time from there and digital clocks are everywhere in the home and on many streets. Old-school watches are either becoming simple fashion accessories or morphing into smart devices that nag you into being more active or take your phone calls a la Dick Tracy.

Incandescent light bulbs are being legislated out of existence in the name of energy conservation and fighting climate change, though more efficient fluorescents present a potential toxic waste hazard if not disposed of properly. We’re going LED at our house.

The Internet of course has cut a swath through entire economic sectors, from retailing to news, information and music.

Newspapers and traditional book publishers are fighting to reposition themselves as digital media. Several newspapers, including La Presse, have bitten the bullet and gone digital-only.

[ Related: Payphones in Canada may soon be an endangered species thanks to CRTC decision ]

[ Related: Energy-friendly but toxic: Compact fluorescent light bulbs pose a recycling dilemma ]

The Encyclopedia Britannica announced in 2012 it would no longer publish a print edition after 244 years of warping bookshelves around the world, killed by easy access to web sources such as Wikipedia. Britannica has gone online, too, of course.

Radical technology-driven change is not really new. The steam-powered industrial Revolution that enabled the mass production of consumer goods killed a lot of traditional craft-based industries. The automobile revolutionized transportation and spawned a cliche about the dubious wisdom of staying in the buggy-whip business.

But the pace at which the new renders the old obsolete seems faster.

The short life of the VCR

The home video recorder (VCR) was hailed as a game-changing entertainment medium when it arrived at the end of the 1970s (remember the VHS vs. Beta war?), allowing us to record TV shows and watch movies at home.

But within 20 years, it was being replaced by the digital versatile disc (DVD), which would quickly become recordable. The technology was an outgrowth of the compact disc (CD), which turned vinyl records into a quaint anachronism valued mostly by audiophiles.

But they, in turn, have been overwhelmed by the advent of digital audio and video downloading and streaming services such as iTunes and NetFlix, which killed the record stores and the relatively short-lived video-rental sector.

Even computers haven’t been immune. The desktop home PC went from an object of wonder in the 1980s to a commonplace appliance 10 years later. Now it looks as though powerful laptops, tablets and smartphones (essentially a computer in your pocket) are sending the space-hogging desktop to technological sidelines.

In his book The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900, British historian David Edgerton argues new inventions never completely supersede old technologies, which co-exist with the new but perhaps are used for other purposes.

The automobile, for instance, replaced the horse as our common mode of personal transportation more than a century ago. We still have horses; we just don’t use them to get to and from work. We ride them for pleasure.

The Yellow Pages is adapting in its way. Story said the company expects some places, such as rural areas in the Prairies and Atlantic provinces, to be heavy users of the traditional directory. It might also decide to reintroduce home-delivery of the book if, after the 18-month rollout is finished, it finds some neighbourhoods still use it more than online versions.

“Like any change, we don’t want to implement this as a one size fits all approach,” she said.